MUSICAL EVENTS NAUSEA A new "Parsifàl" at Bayreuth. BY ALEX ROSS A ray of light: the Grail is fully radi- ant. A dove floats down ffom the dome above." These are RIchard Wag- ner's stage directions for the maximally transcendent final moments of "Parsifal," his last opera. Christoph Schlingensief's production at the Bayreuth Festival last week gave us instead two dead rabbits, their rotting bodies intertwined, their im- ....... \\\ .\, " :\ :, , \ \. \, , l '\titir , 't }t" I' i or,,:, ........... The trouble with this sort of provoca- tion is that if you criticize it, even with an involuntary emetic reflex, you end up playing a role that the instigator has writ- ten for you. You are cast as the reactionat}) the sentimentalist, the sort of person who requires a kitschy white dove, as if white doves and rotting rabbits were the only options. You are suspected of harboring o \ \ :i . '\ .\' .. __' .J' ._1 . - fNrfY? {,'j > . .... -1 I '" ',> <,' I For all its Jaw-dropping lapses in taste, Schlingensief's staging was mainly dull chaos. ages projected on a screen above the stage. We then saw a sped-up film of one rabbit decomposing, its body ffothing as the maggots did their work. I've seen a lot of w stupid, repulsive, irritating, befuddling, and boring things on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensief's dead-rabbit cli- max was something new: for the first time, I left a theatre feeling, like, ready to hurl. Fascist tendencies. When Enclrik Wot- trich, the tenor who sang Parsifal, dis- avowed Schlingensief's attempt to trans- plant the action to Namibia, the director accused him of having uttered racist slurs. No matter that the staging was full of hackneyed "darkest Mrica" imagel}T, with several singers done up in inky blackface; the provocateur will always have the upper hand against the provoked. "If my enemies shout 'boo' at the première, then all is in order," Schlingensief told Stern. Indeed, when the curtain fell, the audi- ence responded with the loudest, lustiest boos I've heard outside of Yankee Sta- dium. Less than a third of the audience applauded when Schlingensief took his bow: In other words, a triumph. A curious charade played out in the press afterward: everyone denied that anything untoward had happened. The bigwigs who had walked down the red carpet at the gala "Parsifal" première said nothing negative when a reporter ffom the Nordbayerischer Kurier canvassed their opinions. Edmund Stoiber, the Minister- President of Bavaria, claimed that the production had suited him "because it presented an entirely new point of view." José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, found it only logical that "Parsifal" had been trans- planted ffom Germany to Mrica. (The opera is set in Spain, but never mind.) Who, then, had made all that noise? Per- haps ordinary opera lovers who had paid for their tickets? When I read the reviews two days later, I was amazed to discover that there hadn't been any scandal at all- only a few boos, perhaps. A new reality was agreed upon that had little to do with what had happened in the theatre. It's all politics, of course. Because German opera houses are heavily sup- ported by state and local governments, the audience's opinion is relatively im- material; productions are bought and sold in a marketplace of intellectual publicity: Whenever I attend this kind of opera- esque event, I feel as though I were being called upon to judge some intricate sport I don't understand, like synchronized swimming. Still, opera it nominally re- mained, and, as opera, it was god-awful. S chlingensief is what the Germans call an Aktionskünstler, or "action artist," meaning that his theatre pieces take the form not of conventional performances but of happenillgs, demonstrations, media pranks, talk shows, even B movies. He is the head of something called the Church of Fear, one of whose slogans is "Don't ex- pect too much from the end of the world!" He is notorious for taunting politicians; in 1997, he was arrested for displaying signs that said, "Kill Helmut KoW." In 2002, he targeted Jürgen Möllemann, of THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 9 & 16, 2004 103